A rare tropical cyclone signal warning #5 was issued for Cagayan, Northern Isabela, Apayao, Northern Kalinga Northern Abra and Ilocos Norte. Thousands of evacuation orders have been issued across Aurora, Cagayan and Ilocos Norte according to local officials and schools and businesses have been closed across most of the northern end of the island.

All for good reason, a video from a ABS-CBN camera crew shows the sheer force of the storm as it blew through Tuguegarao City.

Conditions across the worst hit areas should swiftly improving late morning as the storm tracks off the west coast of Luzon. Rain bands still wrapping in off the South China Sea will continue to impact the west coast though through the afternoon hours. This includes the Metro Manila area where scattered on and off showers could be expected throughout the day.

Haima is the 12th typhoon to hit the Philippines this year. An average of 20 typhoons hit the Southeast Asian nation every year

The forecast for Hong Kong

For now most numerical models take Typhoon Haima on shore east of Hong Kong as a moderate typhoon, still potent but a shell of its former self. Pending any significant change in the track to the west which is highly unlikely it looks like Hong Kong should miss out on any significant impacts from this storm. Guangdong still could see coastal damaging winds and inland flooding through the weekend though. That is often one of the big issues in this area of China whenever a typhoon moves inland it typically drops a tremendous amount of rainfall resulting in significant flooding.

One worry is further north in to South East China, these photos are from Hong Kong on Wednesday following drenching rainfall from the remnants of Sarika that forced the HKO to issue black level rainfall warnings. Parts of the city became paralyzed and with the ground well saturated across South East China wide scale flooding is going to be a major worry over the weekend. With Haima leaving the Philippines this storm is not over yet by a long ways.